I have been reading Harsha Bhogle’s book Out of the Box over the last two days, and I am captivated. It is a collection of articles written by Harsha Bhogle over the last 5-6 years and it is such a delight to read them now with the added advantage of hindsight.

In the bookstore I also found the book that was released to celebrate Gavaskar’s 60th birthday – a collection of 60 articles by Sunil Gavaskar – Straight Drive. I read 2-3 pages of each before deciding to buy Bhogle’s book. The collection of Gavaskar’s articles are also very good, but just cannot be compared to the writing style of Harsha Bhogle. It is like reading match reports in Cricinfo and Times of India – ToI will tell you X batted well, Y bowled well, and Team-Z won; whereas Cricinfo will tell you all those things in such a way that you feel sorely sorry for missing the match, and make a promise to yourself not to miss the live telecast of the match next time India is playing.

Back to Harsha Bhogle’s book, it is really hard to keep it down. Each article is just 2-3 pages only, and has a footnote about whatever incident/match is mentioned in the article. I am opening the book at random, and reading whatever article I land on, and till now (I’ve read about 50% of the book till now), there has not been an article that I skipped over.

Out of the Box is a must buy for anyone who loves to read about cricket and all cricket lovers 🙂